The horror business is booming right now. Over the last few years, it’s become one of the movie industry’s most bankable genres, financially and creatively. Ryan Coogler has already made Oscar-nomination history with a vampire flick of all things, while the combination of Barbarian and Weapons has made director Zach Cregger one of Hollywood’s most exciting new voices – and that’s to say nothing of the huge box-office success of franchise entries like The Conjuring: Last Rites, Final Destination Bloodlines and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.
Only a few months into 2026, and the year in horror is already off to another good start, between 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, entertaining killer monkey ripper Primate and Sam Raimi’s return-to-form, Send Help. Nothing on the docket for the rest of the year immediately screams ‘blockbuster,’ but that’s the great thing about horror: like a bump in the night, the hits often come from unexpected places. Here’s what has stood out like a bloody knife so far.
📽️ The best movies of 2026 (so far)
🔥 The best TV and streaming shows of 2026 (so far)
🧟 The 100 greatest horror movies ever made
A group of traumatised teens must survive a night with a rabid chimp in this Cujo-meets-1970s-PG-Tips-ad horror movie. Director Johannes Roberts works with a smaller menace than the great white sharks in his 2017 thriller 47 Meters Down but doesn’t let that get in the way of the smart tension-building and frequent violent crescendoes. Jane Goodall will turn in her grave, but you’ll believe a humble chimpanzee can go full King Kong.
Built on a killer premise – hear the screech of the Aztec Death Whistle and you’ll die in the way you’re supposed to die in the future – Corin Hardy’s high school horror flick is an entertaining throwback to the ’80s and ’90s heyday of the genre. Likeable performances from the young cast – especially Dafne Keen and Sophie Nélisse – make the inventive kills feel all the more impactful and the whole thing flies on a love for macabre movies. Gorehounds rejoice!
Screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Presence) turns his 2019 novel into a fun bout of retro-flavoured sci-fi splatter, in which a mind-controlling space fungus tries to break out of a subterranean US military container hidden beneath a small-town self-storage facility. Joe ‘Stranger Things’ Keery and Georgina ‘Barbarian’ Campbell are the put-upon employees tasked with saving the planet, in a pleasingly splurgey and sparky throwback to VHS nasties of old.
After a decade-plus of IP work, Sam Raimi makes a glorious return to his horror-comedy wheelhouse, only in this case the horror isn’t supernatural demons but the nightmare scenario of being stranded on a deserted island with your asshole boss – or, from the other perspective, the weird lady from accounting. Held down by pitch-perfect performances from Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, what begins as Cast Away meets Misery sees the power dynamic flip and flip again until you’re unsure who to root for, if anyone. Along the way, Raimi dips into his bag of gross-outs, including bloodbaths, vomit facials, eye-gougings and testicular torture. What more could you want?
Nia DaCosta and Alex Garland, delivering his richest, gnarliest screenplay since Annihilation, reanimate the zombie genre with a bunker’s worth of fresh ideas and some truly dark story beats. We loved the narrative hairpins, bonkers needle drops and Jack O’Connell’s genuinely frightening cult leader. But it’s the sight of Ralph Fiennes’s great survivor Dr Kelson slow-dancing to New Romantic hits with Alpha infected Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) that stick in the mind. This one is horror with soul.
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